Nexus Blitz Dev 8/6: Champion Specific Balance

Hi friends, Figured it would be useful to start a series of posts that give greater context on the changes we make to Nexus Blitz as we get closer to the live Alpha. Today let's talk about champion balance

Champion Specific Balance We hope that most champions are able to find a place in Nexus Blitz's pool of viable picks. We'd love it if you could pick whoever you want and not have to worry about your teammates feeling like they got "stuck with you." We won't be aggressively patching everyone to “perfect balance” but we will take a look at extreme balance outliers who feel overly weak or strong. To this end, we plan on making champion specific balance changes as the need arises. Currently we feel like a number of single target champs are a bit weak so will be the first set of champs with some NB-only buffs to their base stats.

This is something we've been hesitant to do in the past because we feel it is dangerous to make characters feel markedly different in separate game modes. We want the mechanical skills you master on Yasuo in Nexus Blitz to transfer when you decide to play him on SR or ARAM. As an extreme example, we could buff Udyr on this map by giving him a ranged basic attack, but that's a completely different character than the one on SR. Even small changes to things like spell damage or cooldowns can have MASSIVE feel impacts across game modes.

To avoid this, our balance strategy for individual champions will focus primarily on base stats. We've seen on SR that a small adjustment to AD or health can result in significant power changes while not drastically changing how a champion feels to play. We're hoping this could also be effective on NB. Asides from base stats, we’ll also be tweaking champions like who have time based farming mechanics that need to be adjusted due to the pace of the mode.

As a side note, saying "we'd like most champions to be viable" does not mean we expect every team comp to be viable. Picking the 5th marksman into a team that already has 4 and no magic damage is prolly going to be a bad time. We're okay with that. Better pray the first event is Snowball Fight.

Thank you all for the continued feedback. We're so excited to get this map out to you on live.

-August -Nexus Blitz Team-

Ezreal AD:: 60 + 2.5/lvl >>> 63 + 3/lvl AS/lvl:: 1.5% >>> 2.5% Base MP/5:: 8.1 >>> 12

Lee Sin AD/lvl:: 3.2 >>> 4.5 HP/lvl:: 85 >>> 95

Azir AS/lvl:: 1.5% >>> 3% Base Mana:: 438 >>> 500

Rek'sai AD/lvl:: 3.35 >>> 4.5 HP/lvl:: 85 >>> 100

Cassiopeia Base HP:: 537 >>> 580 Base Mana:: 418 >>> 500 Base MP/5:: 8 >>> 11